Rasputin's Bastards (37 page)

“That’s bullshit,” said Alexei , and James’ eyes went wide.

“Don’t shoot me!”

Alexei noticed that at some point he’d raised the gun for emphasis, training it between James’ rounded eyes. He lowered it now.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve had enough grade school reminiscences to last me a while. Tell me the last thing you remember. Before coming here?”

“Well — I went to sleep last night. I was really tired — they’ve got us working in the scaling house most days . . . I just washed up and went to bed.”

“They have you scaling fish?”

“That’s my new job,” said James. “Part of my — re-education.”

“Too bad,” said Alexei. “So you went to bed. And the next thing you know — ”

“Here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Right.”

They regarded one another quietly for a moment.

“What’s Holden up to lately?”

James shrugged. “Don’t know, really. He seems to sleep a lot.”

“Of course he does.”

James must have read something into Alexei’s expression, because he squirmed uncomfortably. “Hey — you’re — you’re not going to beat me up again, are you?”

“Beat you up again?”

James gave him a worried look.

“I have no recollection of ever beating you up,” said Alexei. “Just,” he added, thinking it through, “as you have no recollection of coming here with a gun belonging to Holden Gibson to shoot me.” Alexei lowered the gun to his side. There really was no need — the puppet masters were gone for now. It was just Alexei and James. Alexei felt a tugging in his chest. He flipped on the safety and stuffed the gun barrel-first into the back of his pants.

“No, James. I’m not going to beat you up. Come on down. There’s some food here. Let’s eat and talk.”

James looked relieved. “Thanks,” he said. He winced as his cramping muscles pulled him to his feet.

When one has suffered a very bad trauma — a rape, a beating, a terrible childhood spent with cruel and demanding parents — there always comes a point at which it is good to talk about it. And not just with a psychotherapist, who can at best understand the trauma intellectually. The point comes where one must speak with someone who has gone through the same thing — or one so similar as to be indistinguishable. Even among men who are otherwise complete strangers. Such a conversation can lead all sorts of places — not the least of which is simple insight.

So it went with Alexei and James as they tore through the rest of the cold cuts, and got into the vodka. The talk they had ranged on for hours, until the light from the top of the tower dimmed and diminished into a cool blue, and the base became dark and cold.

James did most of the talking. The mind control stuff was new to him — or so he claimed. But the abuse he underwent at Holden Gibson’s hand was a lifetime’s worth. He’d been with Gibson since he was eight or so — he at this point only had vague memories of his life before that, and most of those memories centred on school, not his parents. Gibson, he said bitterly, had no doubt done a thorough job of erasing those memories, so he could use James for his own purposes.

“Did he — ”

“Feel me up? What do you think?” James swallowed his vodka too quickly and coughed.

“Since you brought it up . . .”

“No. At least — I can’t remember.”

“So what did he do?”

“
Used
us.”

Gibson had a succession of houses and ranches — or at least the use of them — dotted across the U.S. and Canada. Some of the places were quite nice — big estate homes on the edges of nice little college towns, or near defence contractors. There were a couple of farms — and boats. Gibson would move his “family” around for weeks at a time. Once there, he’d set up shop and start the business. The magazine sales racket that Alexei had stumbled across on board the yacht was just one enterprise of many, and they covered the whole range. One month, they’d be selling chocolates for fictitious school fundraisers; the next, running dope for one of Holden’s contacts in Seattle; three months later, picking pockets in train stations.

“There has to be an easier way for someone like Gibson to make a buck,” said Alexei.

“What do you mean?”

Alexei poured himself another mug of vodka. “I’m just saying — he can . . . get into your head, make you do what he wants. . . . Why make you pick pockets?”

“No no no,” said James, his voice slurring with the vodka. “I like pickin’ pockets. I don’ think he did that mind stuff too much — until lately.”

Alexei patted James’ arm. “Sure he didn’t.”

“But he was always a prick,” said James. “I remember he locked me in the trunk of his car — well, not his car — this stockbroker guy whose house we were using. . . .”

“That’s terrible,” said Alexei.

At length, Alexei began to talk about his own pain.

“The worst,” he said, “is not being able to remember anything.”

“Oh yeah — the amn-amen — amnesia.” James tapped his forehead.

“No. That was bullshit. I’m talking about not being able to remember anything at all . . . reliably. I have memories — but they’re not full. For instance — I can recall being in Moscow in 1986 — I remember that: Alexei was in Moscow. But do you know what comes to mind when I think of it?”

James shook his head.

“Nothing! That’s what. Just words:
Alexei worked for a guy in Belarus until last year
. If I think hard I can remember an address where I lived; a part of a telephone number, maybe some street names. But nothing — nothing of the senses. I don’t think I was ever in Belarus — do you know that?”

“That’s fucked up,” said James.

“Yes,” said Alexei, “it is. But,” he added, not wanting to make James feel badly having been outdone, “your story is fucked up too.”

“Thank you.”

They clinked their mugs together.

Fyodor Kolyokov’s afterlife had become like the ocean he feared so much as a dream-walker — a great, chattering place where the language of the mind became a drowning medium; a metaphoric sea all its own.

A sea of Discourse.

It was useful to think of it in such a way, at any rate; metaphor had always been Kolyokov’s lifeline in life — and here in death, it helped.

It helped a great deal in fact: for although a state might in some forms be inescapable, a metaphor sometimes pointed to an otherwise invisible exit.

And this sea — well, no matter how deep their bottoms, didn’t all seas also have a surface?

Kolyokov apprehended that surface now — by pinpricks of light, wavering down through the tumult.

So Fyodor Kolyokov swam up to them. His metaphorical lungs strained, and the sea bottom called to him, but Kolyokov strove upwards. As he drew closer, he saw what those pinpricks were — they resolved into binocular pairs looking out upon a thousand vistas. They were, Kolyokov realized, the eyes of sleepers. A thousand sleepers, maybe more.

Many of the vistas were meaningless to Kolyokov; the back of a bus seat; a magazine article; a highway ahead, white dotted line strobing beneath the hood of a car.

But one — one caught Kolyokov’s eye.

Kilodovich.

Kolyokov’s penultimate hope.

With his last strength, Kolyokov swam towards the vision of Alexei Kilodovich — closer and closer, until the sleeper’s vision became his own.

As he emerged into the young man’s vodka-soaked consciousness, Kolyokov felt like a man who’d traded one drowning for another. Alcohol was one thing that made dream-walking difficult — if he had it himself, it would send him straight to a dreamless stupor; and in another . . . well, it was like trying to make sense to a drunk at a party. An exercise in frustration.

Nonetheless, this time he had to try. The young man was talking to Kilodovich — and before it was too late . . . before he had diminished too much to even make a peep — he had to take over that conversation himself.

But first — he listened, and watched. This was the first time he’d seen Kilodovich in weeks. The man looked good — healthy. He had a discolouration on his forehead, some kind of a bruise, but that looked to be healing now. If Kolyokov had still had lips, they would have pulled into a smile.
The boy looks good
, he thought.

The phantom smile vanished, however, as Kolyokov listened to what Kilodovich was saying.

“The old bastard jerked me around like a puppet from the time I was a boy — just like you, James. He made me do God knows what — replaced my memories. Worked me like a Goddamn marionette. It would have been better” — Kilodovich paused to sip his drink — “it would have been better, you know, if he’d just sent me to a work camp. That, at least . . . That might have left me my soul.”

“Hear hear!” said Kolyokov’s host.

“Fuck Fyodor Kolyokov,” said Alexei, raising his glass. “Fuck him, wherever he is!”

Kolyokov reached out, to take hold of his host’s drunken lips and tongue and larynx. He grasped at them, but they slipped from his fingers again and again. Finally, Kolyokov let them be.

I wouldn’t know what to say with them anyway
, he thought miserably, as he sank back into the murk. He opened his throat, and let the metaphor of water, the spreading Discourse, flood into his lungs.
Drown me
, willed Kolyokov.
I’m done here. I am past done
.

Mi
, thought Heather.
Mi mi mi mi
.

“Have some more tea,” said the big bald man who had introduced himself as Miles. His friend, Richard, who looked about a hundred years old, wiped tears from his eye. Across the dining room of the little café, a table of fishermen avoided looking at them. The big bald man picked up the little steel teapot and started to pour it into Heather’s mug. She put her hand over it.
Any more tea, and I’m going to be peeing a whole ocean
, she thought, then, as the tendrils of her master tickled behind her ear, remembered to stop thinking.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi
!

“Okay,” he said. “No tea for you. Richard?”

“Y-yes. P-please. Oh God.”

Miles poured more into weeping Richard’s cup. Hands trembling, the old man lifted it to his lips and slurped it noisily, like soup.

“You’re wondering why my friend’s crying?”

Mi
, thought Heather.

“Well I’ll tell you. Richard’s a scientist. He spent — how long, Richard?”

“Oh God — thirty years!
Thirty years
!”

“Thirty years, at MIT. He was a full professor there for a while. Isn’t that right, Richard?”

“Oh God!”

“Actually, Richard, you know God’s got nothing to do with it. You were robbed of your life by a Devil, weren’t you now?”

The old man shook his head and lowered it over his teacup. His sobbing intensified.
Mi
, thought Heather, and put her hand on his shoulder.
Mi mi mi mi
.

“O-one d-day,” said Richard, “I-I just . . . left.”

“And where did you end up?”

“E-E-E-E-”

“The
Emissary
,” said Miles. “Say it, Richard.”

“E-Emissary.”

“Good man.” Miles reached over and gingerly pulled Heather’s hand off Richard’s shoulder. “I know you think you’re comforting him. But human contact — well. Old Richard’s had enough of that.”

You can fucking say that again
, she thought.

Hey — bitch — go kill the fuckin’ Russkie
, said Gibson, from a corner of her mind.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi
!

Miles smiled coolly. “Yeah. You had enough of that too, haven’t you? Everybody here’s like us, aren’t they?”

Not — mi mi mi mi — not everybody
. Heather glanced out the front window of the café, up the slope, to the greenhouse. The place where they all slept — all the ones that ran things around here. It was a sprawling thing like a giant cut diamond. At one end squatted a little outbuilding, fashioned out of cut logs, with little windows painted brightly. Its roof was highly peaked, and wood smoke billowed out of the top of it. How hot was it in there? she wondered. As hot as that bathhouse up the hill?

Okay, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you. Let me in
.

She shut her eyes and summoned the mantra. Every time, it seemed more difficult to do. But she still could — the idea of Holden Gibson walking around in her brain — making her do stuff, like he was doing to everyone else on the crew . . .

Mi. Mi. Mi. Mi
.

“So how’d you come here, little girl?” Miles gingerly set her hand back on the table in front of her. “Was it a smell? That was how we got the call — wasn’t it, Richard?”

Richard nodded, still not looking up.

“I’m sitting in the donut shop across from the hotel. And I’m talking a donut shop in New York City. Manhattan. Nothing smells good in that donut shop. Closest thing is the stale dough they use to make their crullers. Otherwise it’s piss and cigarettes and old coffee. But this smell — ” Miles looked up at the ceiling, snapped his fingers “ — what a smell — a — ”

“ — a-a m-mélange?”

“Yeah, Richard. A
mélange
. Good. You cheering up, buddy?”

In fact, Richard seemed to be doing just that. His old lips were still quivering, but they’d pulled back in a kind of a smile. He started to look up. “Pipe smoke,” he said. “Baking bread. Rosewater.”

“See? Richard smelled it too. Only not the same smells — just good smells. The stuff you smelled when you were a kid that let you know you were safe. I can’t speak for Richard here, but when I caught my whiff I was pretty much bottomed out. I’d just remembered — well, never mind what I just remembered. I was bottomed out. But I caught that whiff, I knew what I had to do.”

Richard nodded vigorously.

“I went back into the hotel lobby — isn’t that right, buddy? Walked up to Richard here — and said to him:
Babushka
.”

“Babushka.” Richard repeated it like a line of liturgy at a prayer meeting.

“Yeah.” Miles spared Richard a sidewise grin. “He said it back to me because he’d smelled the same smells. Or the same kind of smells. And he knew like me that it was time to go. So we went!”